The Anti-Cheerleader Clan

I started reading Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, when I was a little over halfway through King Dork. It takes some added concentration, but I think reading a couple books (or more) at once enhances the effect of all of the material- it leads you to insights that you'd surely miss if you were just following along the path provided by one author. It's a little like clicking on hyperlinks on the internet, or like the state of consciousness right before sleeping, when your mind hops from one idea to the next to the next with such speed that you have to backtrack in order to remember what you were first thinking about.

I've occasionally lost track of what's happening in each book- is "Hairwoman" Tom's English teacher or Melanie's? Who's in the Bay Area and who's in upstate New York? And I confuse their sarcastic-loner-Holden-Caulfield-influenced voices here and there. Witness, from page 30 of Speak:

When the pep rally ends, I am accidentally knocked down three rows of bleachers. If I ever form my own clan, we'll be the Anti-Cheerleaders. We will not sit in the bleachers. We will wander underneath them and commit mild acts of mayhem.

Their feelings about the vast majority of their peers- "normal people," as Tom would call them- are nearly identical. The dead giveaway in this passage, of course, is that Tom would never bother attending a pep rally, and would opt instead for stealing audio equipment from the band room. When I allow myself to see that these details don't matter so much, that the two novels can serve as sort of funhouse mirror images of each other, when I find myself playing literary matchmaker and setting up Tom and Melinda on an exploratory burgers-and-milkshake date, I am able to relax and enjoy the parallels- what we English teachers call Universal Themes.

As in a lot of bildungsroman, or coming of age novels, the major themes of Speak and King Dork say something about conformity, and both reach their climax at moments when their protagonists decide strongly against conforming (I'm being purposely vague here, if you hadn't noticed, because I'm trying not to reveal specific plot points). Is this decision surprising for either of the protagonists, or have we seen signs leading up to it all along? What are the consequences of their nonconformity?

Another parallel, and one they share with a number of novels on the list: both books take as their templates the so-called "school story" of Victorian England: they take place over the course of the school year, and most of the action occurs at the school itself. Both King Dork and Speak begin on the first day of school; King Dork occurs over a semester, ending in December, while Speak ends on the last day of school. The Harry Potter series is another example of a school story, with each of the seven novels representing a school year.

So why is this model so appealing to writers of young adult fiction? Why not have a story take place in the middle school year, or the middle of the summer? I have my own ideas about what the answers might be to those questions, but I'd like to hear what you have to say. Comment or something.